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Case Study

Portal Development/XML Content Management:

CQ Press

Background: Washington D.C.-based CQ Press is the leader in government information publishing, providing world-class information on politics, policy, and people since 1945. During the past 2 years, CQ Press has concentrated on creating a suite of electronic products focused on serving the Library Reference market. These new products have used some content that was previously published in print. CQ Press' various Web sites present content that originates from many sources within the organization.

Project: Really Strategies was brought in to assist with a large-scale long-term initiative to create a series of Web products for the library market. The long-term vision meant that CQ Press would need to invest in a single-source XML repository that could feed this innovative suite of online products. Really Strategies assisted with all aspects of the initiative, including product conceptualization, architecture development, content management, technical development, and project management. Over time Really Strategies helped CQ Press develop their CQ Electronic Library (CQEL) portal, which includes a number of individual Web products (CQ Congress, CQ Voting and Elections Collections, and CQ Supreme Court Collection). These products include content from more than 100 reference and text books, CQ Press' weekly publication The CQ Researcher, and custom built databases of supreme court cases, congress activities, and voting and election data.

Result: The management of metadata was a difficult task and one that required a great deal of focus on the database design and specifically how and on what level XML documents were stored within the database. Additionally, other systems were in use that managed content both for print and online. How all these systems work together is a combination of technology and some simple human workflow. Editors may now select paragraph-size chunks of texts, assign metadata to that section, and select for publication to various CQ Press Web products. This system provides CQ Press flexible XML-based management of their content for their editorial workflow and Web publishing processes.

Notable: Two years in a row, three of the CQEL products were selected by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) to win the Best New Electronic Product Award. CQ Congress and CQ Voting and Elections Collections received top honors in the Social Sciences category in the 2003 awards and CQ Press's CQ Supreme Court Collection received the award for the best electronic product in the same category in 2002. The Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of AAP sponsors the selection of the prior year's most outstanding new resources.

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